Today we bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City on our Vietnam 2026 trip for a couple of days to stay in Vũng Tàu on the coast. The small peninsula was a popular retreat for the French colonialists, and is famed within Vietnam for its seafood and large beach. HCMC has become so big that the Vũng Tàu is officially considered part of its metro area, but it still has its own distinct history, character, and charm. Before setting off, we had a salt coffee with condensed milk and a baguette from ...

Last October I made the decision to step down from my role as a global executive in the cybersecurity industry. The last 8 months have gone by in a flash, so I wanted to write a little update on how it's going. Do I regret the decision? Was it the right thing to do? Or have I screwed up the career I've spent 25 years building? The TL;DR is that I'm far happier now than I was back in October. I've battled with whether this was a failure, and I decided that I didn't fail , it was all just m...

At Homebrew Website Club this evening we had a conversation about how to encourage people to make things together using the web. This could mean writing a blog post with someone, responding to someone’s blog post to continue a conversation, contributing to a wiki, creating a list of links, and more. There are so many ways to create with others on the web. My recent blog post about categories was inspired by a discussion with Thomas about work he was doing on his site. Thomas then wrote a...

My original idea for these posts was to write a series titled “Big Tech Is Like…” The sections below were fun to write; I hope they’re also fun to read. See the first post in this series for context. Big Tech is Like a Drug Cartel [Wainwright2017] is one of my favorite books. In order to show how the free market really works, he went and studied it in its pure, unconstrained form: the cocaine cartels. It was a fun and insightful read, and ever since I first encountered it I’ve ...

After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45447 for the project OpenSSL , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a heap use-after-free in PKCS7_verify(). This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone ca...

Click to skip the introduction and go straight to the results. The first part of the story is that, as I already wrote here and here , I am using self-hosted Umami as the analytics engine for this blog. I am using it because I am curious to know how many people visit my blog, and I like numbers and graphs. Of course in this day and age, saying "humans" is a stretch, because you can never be sure if a visit is a human, or a bot. Umami does filter out a lot of the automated traffic because ...

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One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region… Source One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has...

A sudden vibration in your pocket triggers an immediate physical jolt. Your heart rate spikes slightly, your focus snaps, and your muscles tense up before you even look at the screen. This is not a failure of willpower; it is an ancient survival mechanism doing its job. Your nervous system is hardwired to react to unexpected sensory cues as potential danger, translating a simple text alert into a survival emergency. The Evolutionary Root of Your Notification Panic Our ance...

I have been a staunch supporter of Open Source for a long time, including experiments in funding it . I’m a true believer in the idea that Open Source always wins in the long run, but not automatically and not quickly. Right now it is being stressed by AI slop, shifting contributor dynamics, the falling cost of producing code, and large companies learning to close doors behind them. A lot of that battle today is manipulation of the narrative. Opinion makers on social media and in bu...

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy: Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing champion. Our chip designs (ARM) originated from the UK. Canada had BlackBerry, everyone was using Canadian phones. Like Canada, many countries have progressively slid into financialization. Huge banks and bank-related businesses, su...

As part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aerial Logistics Connector (ALC) program that aims to provide logistics to distributed units in a contested environment, Shield AI, Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, L3Harris Technologies, and Parry Labs completed their fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 helicopter. For the first time, the H145 flew with systems from all four companies fully integrated on the aircraft. During testing, Hivemind mission autonomy successfully detected landing zone obst...

LangChain recently posted about a database they built. I liked the post quite a bit, I thought it was pretty well written and did a really good job of explaining their architecture. It highlighted for me some of the interesting database challenges and workloads that are consequences of AI. This is an "observability database," which sits sort of outside the traditional OLTP/OLAP dichotomy, but leans a bit on the OLAP side. It exists to collect data from a bunch of different sources (in LangCh...

The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are with managers. Engineers don’t have a lot in common with legal, or design, or sales, but they also don’t need to interact much with those roles. In my experience, engineers are communicating with product managers...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan. Image: ISRO India’s Chandrayaan program is one of the few in the world dedicated to the exploration of our Moon. Starting with its discovery of lunar water that catalyzed the global Moon rush of today, the program has gotten media and creator attention worldwide. However, the coverage has often lacked the program’s specific scientific, technological, and geopolitical outcomes being laid out and contextualized agai...

A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder) by randomly combining increasingly useful existing components. We analyzed this as a way of simplifying a search problem: by using existing, working components as modules that can be combined, a few at a time, into more complex module...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster.  In the last post Broker-Visible vs Client-Local Parallelism we looked at two ways of scaling Kafka consumption. The final unit of parallelism can be visible to the broker, as consumers, or it can be local to the client, as threads, virtual threads, async tasks, or some other execution mechanism hidden behind a smaller number of consumers.  Broker-visible parallelism is simple to reason about: if each consumer processes records seria...

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast . It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can't do. First, let's review the key characteristics. Anthropic claim that Claude Fable 5 offers the sam...

There are two ways to look at the P v NP problem, as a formal mathematically defined conjecture as a Clay Millennium Prize Problem, and as the more intuitive notion that everything efficiently verifiable is efficiently computable and the implications that has on our ability to compute. I've written considerably about how artificial intelligence has affected the latter. In particular, how AI and other advances in computing have brought us to this Optiland of getting most of the good implicati...

Tigris is S3-compatible, which means you can point the AWS SDK at it and most things just work. The catch is that the Tigris-exclusive features—bucket forking, snapshots, object renaming, and the like—need verbose workarounds because the AWS SDK doesn't know they exist. So we wrote a Go SDK that does. It comes in two flavors: the storage package is a drop-in replacement for the standard S3 client with first-class methods for the Tigris-specific operations, and simplestorage is ...

A week in which some things happen and some things do not happen, much like other weeks.  Current situation: Not pictured: The 3 different kinds of beef jerky we just got at Buc-ee’s. The pain of having children who become driving teenagers is the exorbitant cost of auto insurance. The joy is getting to stare out the window as the midwestern landscape moves by and think about nothing and everything for hours at a time.  Monday 01 June: Dentist in ...

A few weeks ago, I was at my brother’s place, watching NBA, and amongst other things, I was teasing him about the fact that he’s putting up weight. Which is just a fact. But he’s also in his 40s, so that’s understandable. He pointed out that I’m also gaining weight (but I’m not in my 40s), and since it was a long time since I weighed myself, I decided to hop on a scale, and the number that came out was 89.6kg. Now, I’m 190cm tall, so being almost 90kgs isn’t really a tragedy but ...